We have received several complaints regarding a recent interview response which advocated, and appeared to incite, violence against people of different political beliefs. We have removed that material, and would like to apologize to our readers for our error in judgment in publishing it.
Publishing sometimes involves tradeoffs between competing principles. When we originally reviewed the interview before publication, it was the first time in 3½ years that we’d received such an inflammatory statement. We faced a choice between free speech (one of our goals is to give our featured authors an open platform that lets them present themselves as they wish to be) and community standards (one of our goals is to make positive contributions and draw people closer together in the spirit of the show). In hindsight, we made the wrong choice.
It’s easy — and tempting — to err on the side of free speech by drawing a mental line between the words that we write and the words that we copy-and-paste from the featured author. But that’s also incorrect. We are ultimately responsible for all the words put out under our name, even if they were written by someone else. Publishing advocacy of violence was an abdication of that responsibility, and that isn’t the sort of example we want to set.
